I don’t think I know how to write a book about something; how to create a book with a purpose. It’s something I have in mind for my next couple of novels, but only conceptually; I don’t have a clear meaning in mind, yet, just the idea that I’d maybe like these books to be about something. There’s a hint of the shape of a structural symmetry I want to build between the two novels I have in mind, but the structure looks like it’ll only really stand up when there’s meaning or purpose at its core.
I suppose in some ways I’m still a nihilist. I have trouble seeing the meaning in most everything. Life seems largely to exist without purpose. On the other hand: My faith informs me that the only meaningful purpose in life is spreading the good news of Jesus Christ, perhaps with living a life according to the example of Jesus’ life coming in as a distant second. I’m not as good at either of those things as I ought to be, or as I wish I were, and I’ve been trying to do better and to gradually work more and more of that purpose into my writing. A problem I’ve been having, mentally, is in trying to conform my mind to the Will of God… and still tell the stories I have it in me to tell, in a way I know how to tell them.
This is another side of the problem I’m writing about here. Sure, there’s the side where I don’t see that anything is really about anything. I can write and tell stories, no problem, but it’s all just meaningless. To me. On this other side I know about something meaningful, but I haven’t yet figured out how to write or tell stories about it.
Interruption: My iBook just died, which is what I was writing this post on. I was going to write more, but those 300 words sum up the problem pretty well. I may do another post later, to do the working-through-the-problem-in-words I’d meant to do, but a dead laptop is a more pressing problem right now. Help me deal with it: Go buy something I’ve created, even though I do find it all meaningless.
